Mohenjo Daro 101 | National Geographic

[Music] The ancient city of Mohenjo-Daro is one of the first urban centers in human history. Nestled in southern Pakistan's Indus River Valley, Mohenjo-Daro is the largest and best-preserved city of the Indus civilization, the earliest known civilization of the Indian subcontinent. Mohenjo-Daro was built around 2500 BC, about the same time the great pyramids were being built in Egypt, and expanded a surface area of nearly 500 acres—an incredible size for a city of this time period.

Because of Mohenjo-Daro's grand scale, archaeologists believe it may have served as a seat of power for the Indus civilization. The city was divided into two districts: the Citadel and the Lower Town. The Citadel is home to the city's exceptional monuments, including the Great Baths, a 900 square foot tank fed from the Indus River. Mohenjo-Daro also had a sophisticated water system; houses had baths and toilets, and the town featured both an elaborate sewage system and fresh water from 700 wells throughout the city.

The Roman baths—some of history's most famous waterway systems—weren't constructed until many hundreds of years after Mohenjo-Daro's scrape baths. Mohenjo-Daro has no places of worship or governance, such as palaces, royal tombs, or temples. This may indicate that the society was not built around state interests, like the Egyptian and Mesopotamian societies at the time. Rather, the class structure of Mohenjo-Daro may have been relatively equal.

The city's second district, the Lower Town, may demonstrate the society's egalitarian structure. The Lower Town, with its intricate water system, was home to between 20,000 to 40,000 people. Unlike many urban areas of its time, it was laid out in a grid system, similar to modern-day city blocks.

After approximately 600 years, the city collapsed. No one is quite sure why, but the cause could potentially have been a change within the culture or in the path of the river. Without its crucial source of water, the city's residents may have moved away, leaving Mohenjo-Daro nearly abandoned. In 1911, nearly 4,000 years after the city fell into ruin, archaeologists paid their first visit. The ensuing decades of excavations have unearthed countless clues that tell the tale of Mohenjo-Daro, but it still holds secrets for us to discover. [Music]